Last month, news bubbled that the Victorian State government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022. “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January.

In March 2023, Victoria’s Minister for Industry and Innovation, Ben Carroll, made a visit to Israel praising it for being “one of the world’s most innovative economies”. His trip – which cost in the order of $43,714 – was all “about making industry and business connections in Israel that will deliver new job opportunities for Victoria.” No direct mention of the MoU was made.

The circumstances of the agreement were obscure, and details non-existent. That is, if you were consulting anything at the Victorian level. No public announcement was made, nor any fanfare generated. The only evidence in Australia of the agreement’s existence comes in a listing on the Commonwealth’s Foreign Arrangements Scheme Register. Approval to Victoria to enter the agreement was given on October 17, 2022.

When asked about the content of the MoU, Minister for Government Services Gabrielle Williams denied that any “sort of deal” had been “struck as part of it”. Not that we would know. “Obviously, our commercial contracts with businesses and jurisdictions, particularly in defence, are highly sensitive.”

It takes a glance at Israeli sources to cast some light on this near-absent discussion taking place in the antipodes. Israel’s Ministry of Defence saw no reason to keep quiet about it, stating on social media outlets that its International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) and the Victorian statement government had “signed an industrial defence cooperation statement” that December. “The statement is a formal framework that paves the way for continuing cooperation between the parties.”

Those present at the signing ceremony were SIBAT’s chief, the retired General Yair Kulas, and Penelope McKay, acting secretary for Victoria’s Department of Jobs, Precincts, and Regions.

The MoU with Israel continues the State’s freehanded approach to brokering deals with states of eclectic political hue. In April 2021, the previous Morrison government felt that the tendency had gone too far, terminating four agreements made by the Victorian government with government entities in Iran, Syria and China.

The agreements with Iran and Syria, signed in November 2004 and March 1999 respectively, were purportedly of an educational, scientific and training nature. The two agreements with China constituted an MoU and framework agreement with the National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The reasoning of then Foreign Minister Marise Payne was terse: “I consider these four arrangements to be inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy or adverse to our foreign relations in line with the relevant test in Australia’s Foreign Relations (State and Territory) Arrangements) Act 2020.”

The MoU was the fruit of a relationship between the state and Israel’s defence industry stretching back a decade. Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems all have offices in Melbourne. Elbit Systems, Israel’s primary drone manufacturing company, has been particularly aggressive. Through Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), it established a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne after announcing its plans to do so in February 2021.

One of its main co-sponsors is the state government’s Invest Victoria branch. The body is tasked with, in the tortured word of the government, “leading new entrant Foreign Direct Investment and investment opportunities of significance as well as enhancing the business investment environment, developing and providing whole-of-government levers and strengthening the governance of investment attraction activities.” RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation also did its bit alongside the state government in furnishing support.

The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence was billed as a peaceful endeavour. The company’s then managing director and retired Australian Major General Paul McLachlan wanted to impress his audience with the noble goals of developing drone technology, which entailed counting any “number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.”

McLachlan, in focusing on “the complex problems that emergency management organisations face during natural disasters” avoided the gruesome report card of the technology. Drones had been used to account for the killing and monitoring of Palestinians in Gaza, with its star performer being Elbit’s Hermes craft. A grisly fact from the summer months of July 2014, when the IDF was making much use of Elbit’s murderous products in Gaza, company profits increased by 6.1%.

It was telling that this record was of little concern to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge. As he told the ABC, the MoU “would have been entirely uncontroversial before the Israel-Hamas war. But now, of course, there’s a live domestic debate about the war, and … most people are concerned about civilian casualties.”

With that sort of reasoning, Israel’s historical record towards Palestinians can be dismissed as peripheral and inconsequential to the current bloodbath sparked by the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas. The Jewish state’s ethno-nationalist approach to controlling and dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank and the stomping and suffocating of Gaza, can be then seen as “controversial” only in current terms.

The Victorian Greens have sought to push the state government to shred the MoU. On February 7, the party released a statement promising to introduce a motion calling on the Victorian government “to end its secretive relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence.” They also demanded the government “sever any ties with companies arming Israel’s Defence Force, which has killed 27,500 Palestinians in less than four months.”

This state of affairs has presented Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with an ample opportunity. The Commonwealth’s termination of previous agreements entered into by Victoria deemed against the national interest comes into play as a formidable precedent. And it can hardly be said to be in the national interest to aid a state engaged in potentially genocidal acts. That claim, pressed on by South Africa, is currently under review before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. But as lawyers and judges ponder, the Victorian state government continues its stony silence on the subject.

https://johnmenadue.com/complicit-victorian-governments-secret-israeli-defence-ministry-mou-sparks-outrage/

 

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DIANA JOHNSTONE: Genocide Meets French Devotion to Israel

 

Israel’s loyal supporters in the West combat rising world indignation over the suffering of the Palestinian people by changing the subject.  

When Gazan families are buried under the rubble of their homes, it’s not about the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians; it’s about eternal Jewish victims; it’s about “Islamic terrorism;” or it’s about a threat to “Western values.”

That is the line taken by most of the French media and political class.

Or there is recourse to Biblical story-telling, featuring vengeance, ethnic slaughter and prophecy of doom. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares a struggle between good and evil: 

“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness and light shall triumph over darkness.  Now my role is to lead all Israelis to an overpowering victory… We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah…”

In the United States of America, the crazed prophecies of the Israeli leader find support from an American variant of Judeo-Christianity, more Judeo than Christian, whose followers are taught to believe that gentle Jesus will zoom back to earth as a murderous Avenger while his faithful float up to heaven.

 

France & the Shoah

Skeptical France is very far from such fantasies. French support to Israel is longstanding and political, but tinged with semi-religious devotion rooted in recent history.

France is officially, even ostentatiously, a secular nation, considerably de-christianized over the past two hundred years.  

To a unique extent, over the past half century, this religious void has been filled by the sacred remembrance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is usually called here.

It all began in 1954 when 27-year-old Jewish journalist named Eliezer Wiesel met the 70-year-old Catholic novelist François Mauriac in Paris. 

Mauriac was deeply moved by Wiesel’s “resurrection” from his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, seeing him as a Christ figure. For Mauriac, the sacrifice of the Jews recalled the Crucifixion of Jesus.

With help from the prominent French writer, Wiesel transformed his copious Yiddish notes into a French memoir, La Nuit (Night), the testimony that transformed him into a major spiritual figure of the post-World War II era.

It was Mauriac, the devout Christian, who saw in Wiesel and his people the parallels with Christianity, which as the Shoah was destined to take on the attributes of a state religion in France as memories of the Nazi occupation were transformed into sacred myth.

 

An Alliance Against Arab Nationalism 

When the Nazis invaded France, there were approximately 320,000 Jewish people living in France, including a large number of foreign nationals who had fled from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.  

Those unfortunate exiles made up the bulk of the 74,000 Jews who were brutally rounded up and deported under German occupation.  These deportations are the principal factual basis for what developed into a sense of national responsibility for the Shoah comparable to that of Germany itself.

However, of all Nazi-occupied countries, France is the country where the largest percentage of Jews escaped Nazi deportations.  An estimated 75 percent of Jews survived the occupation without being deported, including around 90 percent of Jews with French citizenship. 

The reasons for this are controversial, but one result is that France has the largest Jewish population in Europe today — around half a million, the third largest Jewish population in the world, although far behind Israel or the United States (with around 7 million each). 

In recent years, many Jews have moved to Germany from Russia and from Israel itself (118,000 altogether), making France and Germany the home to more Jews than any other member state of the European Union. They are also the countries where institutionalized repentance for the Shoah is most developed. 

A difference is that a number of prominent Jews in Germany are sharply critical of Israel (which may get them in trouble with the law), whereas the French Jewish community is more solidly Zionist.  The politically influential Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), a sort of French AIPAC, fiercely defends Israeli interests.

A significant peculiarity of France is that Europe’s largest Jewish population is cohabitating with continental Europe’s largest population of Muslim origin, mostly Arab.  Although France officially avoids ethnic or racial counting, this population is estimated at around 15 million.  

While politically disorganized, this community is assumed — especially by Jewish community leaders — to be hostile to Israel. The potential for conflict between these two communities — one very small and very influential, the other very large and disparate — has for years haunted French political leaders.

 

France & Arab Nationalism

When the Jewish State was just a dream, it was seen by some as a sort of socialist project, based on the kibbutz. Building on long standing friendly relations between French Socialists and Zionism, France was the closest Western ally of the new State of Israel. 

In 1954, the government of Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet agreed to sell Israel whatever military equipment it wanted. France even helped Israel develop nuclear weapons. 

At that time, Tel Aviv and Paris were allied against Arab nationalism, inasmuch as secular, left-leaning Arab States (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) sympathized with both the Palestinians and the rising national liberation movement in French Algeria.

But this changed under Charles De Gaulle, who conceded Algerian independence in 1962, put an arms embargo on the region in 1967 and sought to build balanced relations with Arab States as part of an effort to develop friendly, post-colonial relations with the Global South.  

In June 1967, Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Days War was celebrated in the streets of Paris by joyous horn honking.  But President De Gaulle had opposed the Israeli expansion and called for a sustainable peace based on evacuation of territories conquered by Israel and mutual recognition by the belligerent states.

In a remarkable press conference on Nov. 27, 1967, De Gaulle expressed ongoing support for the existence of Israel as a fait accompli while expressing strong misgivings about the future of Jewish rule over Palestinian territories.  

After recalling the shared admiration for the Jewish people and sympathy for their suffering, De Gaulle observed, in respect to the creation of a Jewish state, that: 

“Some even dreaded that the Jews, up to then dispersed, but who remained what they had always been, that is an elite people, self-confident and domineering, when once reunited on the site of their ancient greatness, might come to transform the highly moving wishes expressed for nineteen centuries into an ardent and conquering ambition.” 

 

De Gaulle recalled that he had promised that France would defend Israel from any Arab attack, but implored Israel not to use its advantage to attack its Arab neighbors. 

“We know that France’s voice was not heard. Israel having attacked, in six days of combat seized the objectives it wished to attain. Now, on the captured territories, it is organizing an occupation which cannot go on without oppression, repression, expulsions, and a resistance to all that which it will call terrorism.”

In response to these statements, prominent Jewish intellectuals and community leaders ceased to revere De Gaulle as the leader of the Resistance.  Around this time, the Resistance itself as national patriotic myth was rapidly discredited as the public imagination of Nazi Occupation came to center on the Holocaust.

Cinema played a role. In 1967, the documentary film by Marcel Ophuls, “The Sorrow and the Pity”, convinced audiences that collaboration rather than Resistance had overwhelmingly dominated occupied France.  The film had a strong impact on public opinion, not least on young leftists who the following year carried out a libertarian revolt targeting the two political heirs to the Resistance: the French Communist Party and President Charles De Gaulle.  

In the revisionist mood of the time, national pride stemming from the Resistance gave way to national shame over the deportation of Jews.  This guilt became a sort of public ritual for audiences who watched Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour long documentary “Shoah,” released in 1985.  In 1990, France adopted a measure called the Gayssot law which can lead to heavy fines and even imprisonment for any questioning of the official version of the Holocaust.  

As I wrote in my book Circle in the Darkness, heresy defines religion. A French citizen can deny the existence of Napoleon, or any other historic event, but any questioning of the official version of the Shoah is blasphemy. Thus by sacralizing a unique historic event, the Gayssot law in effect established the Shoah as a state religion. 

The Shoah is celebrated officially and unofficially, not only in the annual Shoah commemoration but almost constantly in school rooms, trips to Auschwitz, radio and television programs, books and films.  It has de factoreplaced Christianity, which had succumbed to laïcité (secularism) over a century ago, as the State religion.  It has its martyrs and saints, its holy scripture, its rituals, its pilgrimages, everything that Christianity had except redemption.

 

Expanding Role of Political Islam

Meanwhile, France’s post-war industrial buildup drew thousands of workers from Algeria.  

It wasn’t until new laws in the 1970s allowed “family reunion” that regrouping of foreign workers with wives and children began to create large immigrant neighborhoods, especially in the suburbs of Paris and other large cities, with their own ethnically distinct religious practices, food and dress, especially veiled women, clashing visibly with French customs. 

The growth of these communities had a strong impact on the political environment.  The National Front, a coalition of far right groups led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, called for stopping immigration, and the new left issued from the May ’68 movement became their champions. 

In the early 1980s, in order to accommodate European unification, Socialist President François Mitterrand abandoned the program of nationalizations and social measures for which he had been elected in coalition with the French Communist Party (PCF). 

The PCF left the coalition and subsequently lost its influential role both in assimilating foreign workers and in opposing unlimited immigration. The Socialists thereupon adopted human rights and antiracism as their defining issues, condemning opposition to immigration as racist. Accused of anti-Semitism, the National Front was condemned as a pariah with no fit place in the Republic.  This condemnation was ensured by Le Pen’s conviction under the Gayssot law for having stated, in an interview, that gas chambers were “a detail of World War II.” 

While the left has increasingly adopted an “open border” acceptance of immigration, it has increasingly advocated measures to ban Muslim customs seen to violate the official French doctrine of laïcité. 

French laïcité was institutionalized by the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, which finally deprived the Catholic Church of its traditional role in education. In response to an apparent growth of religious practice among younger Muslims, laïcité was revitalized by banning religious identity signaling in public schools, notably by prohibiting school girls from wearing Muslim headscarves to cover their hair. This focus on female dress later produced a ban on wearing the burka in public. While intended to promote cultural assimilation, such measures can also feed Muslim resentment at being a discriminated minority.

 

Western Schizophrenia Toward Islam

In 1979, Western attitudes toward Islam entered their drastically schizophrenic period, decrying the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a political and human rights disaster, while giving full support to Islamic Mujahidin in neighboring Afghanistan.  

French political exhibitionist Bernard Henri Lévy was a most zealous supporter of Afghan Muslims opposing the Russian incursion which failed to save modernizing progressive forces in Kabul.

It was President Jimmy Carter’s chief strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski who saw the potential of militant Islam to defeat Soviet influence in Central Asia.  In the 1990s, the United States secretly backed illegal arming of Mujahideen to fight on the Islamic side in Bosnia, against Serbia, considered in Washington a miniature Russia.  For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.

Israel’s initial enemies were linked to secular Arab nationalism: the Popular Liberation Forces (PLF), Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).  In Gaza, the local branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, banned in Egypt and hostile to secular groups, looked harmless, especially since its leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, was a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair and half blind.

Yassin built an Islamic center, called the Mujamma, which gained popularity by a variety of social and charitable activities.  The Israeli overlords favored this development as it rivaled the secular resistance groups. Israel officially recognized the Mujamma in 1979 and the number of mosques in Gaza doubled under Israeli administration. 

“For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.”

 

It was only during the Palestinian uprising of December 1987, known as the First Intifada, that Sheikh Yassin created Hamas, dedicated to Islamist resistance. Close to the people through its cultural and sports activities, the Islamic organization had a popular base that eventually led to electoral success in Gaza against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 2006.

The complicated U.S. instrumentalization of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Islamist revolution in Iran, U.S. support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran before waging war against Saddam Hussein, led in mysterious ways to the dramatic Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, whose one clear political effect was to cement the U.S.-NATO-Israeli alliance against “Islamic terrorism.”

This term has involved confounding different, often mutually hostile, groups with each other as well as falsely associating peaceful Muslims with armed groups. Israeli leaders had always denounced Palestine resisters as terrorists, including those who were Christian. But Islamist terrorism was a threat that made it easier to identify Israel as the front line in defense of Western Judeo-Christian civilization.  

From then on, the United States and its NATO followers have ravaged the Middle East, using Islamist extremism as official enemy or factual ally, to destroy the three most secular and pro-Palestinian States in the region, Iraq, Libya and Syria — executing Saddam Hussein, murdering Moammer Gaddafi and persisting in illegal occupation and sanctions against Syria aimed at overthrowing Bashir al Assad.

 

Terrorist Attacks in France

Following the Gaullist tradition, President Jacques Chirac kept France out of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. But subsequent governments aligned with the United States, and Bernard-Henri Lévy ostentatiously goaded France into assaulting Libya.  France has paid a heavy price in blowback for its ambiguous encounters with Islam. In the last 12 years, the country has experienced an extraordinary number of authentic, Islamist, terrorist attacks against civilians by fanatics shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

[Related: How the West’s War in Libya Spurred Terrorism in 14 Countries]

–In March 2012, a man named Mohammed Merah shot dead seven people, including a French rabbi and three young Jewish children in southern France.  His stated motives included Palestine and the French ban on the burka.  

–On Jan. 7, 2015, two coordinated attacks occurred, causing a major shock to the public. Gunmen entered the offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and murdered eight well-known cartoonists and two guards, in revenge for having published insulting cartoons of the Prophet. Meanwhile an accomplice killed several people in the course of taking hostages in a kosher grocery.

–The deadliest attack took place in the evening of Nov. 13 the same year, killing 131 people and wounding 413 more when Islamist fanatics from Belgium blew themselves up outside a major sports event, sprayed gunfire and grenades into the theater during a rock concert and across café terraces in Paris. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) called the attacks retaliation for French bombing of Syria.

–On Bastille day 2016, a Tunisian drove a 19-ton cargo truck into a holiday crowd on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring 434 before being shot dead by police.

–Twelve days later, an 86-year-old priest was stabbed to death while saying mass in a church in Normandy.  ISIS claimed responsibility.

–On Oct. 6, 2020, in the course of a class on freedom of expression, middle-school teacher Samuel Paty showed his class Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet, after permitting Muslim students to leave if they chose.  Ten days later, in retribution, the teacher was stabbed and beheaded in the street by 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, an Islamic Chechen refugee accorded political asylum from Russia.  This caused an enormous shock in France, not least among the teaching profession.

–On Oct. 13, 2023, a 20-year-old Chechen political refugee shouting Allahu Akbar attacked a school in the northern French city of Arras, stabbing to death French literature teacher Dominique Bernard.

In this context, people in France are particularly sensitive to the term “Islamic terrorism,” [as if the entire religion of Islam was responsible, rather than calling it Islamist terrorism, which refers to political Islam.] 

When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as “Islamic terrorism,” implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France. 

Contrary to those attacks, the well organized Hamas fighters carried out a successful military operation, breaching the Israeli wall that imprisons Gaza and overrunning Israeli military bases.  This operation had clear objectives, in particular, the taking of hostages to exchange for some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.  The hostage-taking was a clear invitation to negotiations, but the Israeli regime loathes any negotiations that could “legitimize” a Palestinian movement.

“When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as ‘Islamic terrorism,’ implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.” 

The government initially banned demonstrations protesting against Israel’s massive attacks on the people of Gaza. Peaceful demonstrators were brutalized and fined by police.  However, bans have been dropped and pro-Palestinian demonstrations have continued. Opposition to Israel’s genocidal retaliation against the people of Gaza is surely strong throughout the French population, especially among the youth, but it has very little political voice and so far, no pollsters are measuring it.

French media echoed wildly exaggerated Israeli reports of Hamas atrocities and the “rise of anti-Semitism.”  

Newspapers featured growing Jewish fears of being attacked here in France. The Israeli government has deliberately exploited fear of anti-Semitism to encourage French Jews to move to Israel, but the success of the Hamas incursions risks shaking confidence in Israel as Jews’ one safe refuge — cramming half the world’s Jewish population into a small space surrounded by enemies.  

 

Left & Right Switch Positions 

In the days following Oct. 7, mainstream media interviewers tested every politician with the demand to condemn Hamas as an “Islamist terrorist organization.”  Almost all enthusiastically complied, emphasizing their support for “Israel’s right to exist” (whatever that might entail). 

From Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel to Eric Zemmour, founder of a nationalist party to the right of Marine Le Pen’s, French politicians were unanimous in condemning Hamas’ “brutal terrorist attack” – with one exception. The notable exception was the country’s leading leftwing politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Mélenchon refused to denounce Hamas as a “terrorist organization.”  Hamas killings of civilians were “war crimes,” like any killing of civilians, he said.  The attacks, he tweeted, “prove only one thing: violence only produces and reproduces itself.  Horrified, our thoughts and our compassion go to all the distressed populations, victims of it all. A ceasefire should be imposed.” 

Many parliamentary members of Mélenchon’s party “La France Insoumise” (LFI, France Unbowed) followed suit, contrary to other sections of the fragmented left.  Danièle Obono, an African-born LFI Paris MP was rudely goaded by a hostile TV interviewer into saying that Hamas “is a resistance movement, that’s what it calls itself…its objective is the liberation of Palestine… it resists occupation.”  Within a couple of hours, Interior Minister Gérard Darmanin announced that he was having her charged with “apology for terrorism.”

A verbal lynch mob rose up against Mélenchon, a chorus vigorously joined not only by his enemies on the right but also by rivals in smaller parties belonging to the disintegrating leftist electoral coalition NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire, Ecologique et Social) which he founded. Mélenchon and the LFI are denounced as “Islamo-leftists,” flattering terrorists to win over the Muslim vote.

Yonathan Arfi, the president of CRIF, angrily denounced Mélenchon as “an enemy of the Republic.”  Mélenchon, he raged, “chose not to express solidarity with Israel but to legitimize terrorism by an equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”  

Meanwhile Serge Klarsfeld, famous as a lifelong Nazi hunter and president of the association Sons and Daughters of Deported Jews of France, rejoiced that Marine Le Pen had completely changed the ideology of her party, the Rassemblement National, from that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.  

Marine Le Pen led her party in a Nov. 12, 2023  Paris demonstration against anti-Semitism while emphasizing her support for Israel. As a result, she has “become respectable”, he concluded. Such approval will make it hard to demonize her in future elections as in the past. 

Referring to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Klarsfeld expressed regret that “the far left has abandoned its line of action against anti-Semitism,” while noting that “the extreme left has always had an antisemite tradition.”

And thus a long brewing political reversal is being completed, not only in France but across Europe and even America.  Israel, whose early supporters were on the left, from the Soviet Union to the French Socialists, is most vigorously championed by the right, whereas more and more people (but rarely politicians) on the left are joining the non-Western world’s shock and horror at the genocidal actions of Israel against the Palestinian people.

 

The War of Civilizations

The most extreme champions of Israel, including numerous commentators and Eric Zemmour, a journalist who founded a nationalist, anti-Muslim party called Reconquest to the right of Marine Le Pen, merge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a worldwide war of civilizations. For them, Hamas is just part of an international Islamic war on Western civilization.  In this view of things, Israel is the vanguard of Western civilization whose main enemy is anti-Semitism.

In the midst of this turmoil, President Emmanuel Macron follows the European trends, but with notes of ambiguity confirming his position as a perfect centrist.  He hesitated before suspending funding to UNRWA, then did so claiming his intention was to obtain a cease-fire. Such uncertainty can only displease both sides of the embittered national division over Gaza.  

He stayed away from the politically overcharged Nov. 12 demonstrations against anti-Semitism, but compensated by leading a Feb. 7 commemoration in Paris of the 42 French and Franco-Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attacks. The French government chartered a plane to fly in relatives of the victims from Israel. Participants booed and shouted “fascist!” and “terrorists!” at parliamentarians from Mélenchon’s party who showed up to pay their respects.

In a cold rain, Macron read out the first names of the 42 victims whose lives, he said, were “shattered by terrorist fury.”

“On October 7, at dawn,” he said, “the unspeakable resurfaced from the depths of history,” producing “the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.”   So in France, it seems, that what Oct. 7 was really about was not Gaza, nor Israel, and certainly not about the Palestinians, but fundamentally about a resurgence of the impunity wrought by the ever-present Shoah.

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/11/diana-johnstone-genocide-meets-french-devotion-to-israel/

 

 

 

 

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Around 1,4 million displaced people are currently in Rafah, sometimes sheltering under plastic bags transformed into tents. The US administration, supposed guardian of Israeli law and conscience, has conditioned the invasion of Rafah to plan Israeli evacuation of the city. Such a plan does not and cannot exist, even if Israel manages to come up with something.

It is impossible to transport a million completely destitute people, some of whom have already been displaced two or three times, from one “safe” place to another, which always turns into battlefields. It is impossible to transport millions of people as if they were calves for shipment. Even calves cannot be transported with such cruelty.

There is also no place to evacuate these millions of people. In the devastated Gaza Strip, there is no place to go. If the Rafah refugees are moved to Al-Mawasi, as the IDF proposes in its humanitarian plan, Al-Mawasi will become the scene of a humanitarian disaster unprecedented in the Gaza Strip.

Yarden Michaeli and Avi Scharf report that the entire population of the Gaza Strip, 2,3 million people, is supposed to be evacuated in an area of ​​16 square kilometers, approximately the size of Ben-Gurion International Airport. The whole Gaza Strip in the airport area, just imagine.

Amira Hass calculated that if only one million people go to Al-Mawasi, the population density there will be 62 people per square kilometer. There is nothing in Al-Mawasi: no infrastructure, no water, no electricity, no houses. Only sand and more sand, to absorb blood, sewage and epidemics. This idea is not only blood-curdling, it also shows the level of dehumanization that Israel has achieved in its planning.

Blood will be shed in Al-Mawasi, as it was recently in Rafah, the penultimate refuge offered by Israel. The Shin Bet security service will find a Hamas cadre who will have to be eliminated by dropping a one-ton bomb on the new tent camp. Twenty passers-by, most of them children, were killed. Military correspondents will tell us, with shining eyes, about the marvelous work done by the IDF to liquidate the Hamas high command. There total victory is near, the Israelis will be satisfied again.

But despite this force-feeding, the Israeli public must wake up, and with him the Biden administration. This is an emergency more serious than any other during this war. Americans must block the invasion of Rafah with actions, not words. They are the only ones who can stop Israel.

The conscientious sector of the Israeli public seeks sources of information other than "news" stations.cakes for soldiers» which call themselves news channels. Watch images of Rafah on any foreign channel – you won't see nothing in Israel – and you will understand why we cannot evacuate him. Imagine Al-Mawasi with two million displaced people, and you will understand the war crimes taking place here.

On Saturday, the body of six-year-old Hind Rajab Hamada was found. The little girl had become famous around the world after the moments of terror she and her family experienced on January 29 when faced with an Israeli tank - moments which had been recorded during a telephone call with the Palestinian Red Crescent, until the her aunt's screams of terror stop. Seven family members were killed; only little Hind had survived, and her fate had remained a mystery ever since.

Hind was found dead in her aunt's burned-out car at a gas station in Khan Yunis. Wounded, covered by the seven bodies of her loved ones, she bled to death before being able to escape the vehicle. Hind and his family had responded to Israel's "humanitarian" call to evacuate. Those who want thousands more Hind should invade Rafah, whose population will be evacuated to Al-Mawasi.

  

palestinianyouthmovement

https://en.reseauinternational.net/une-incursion-israelienne-a-rafah-dans-la-bande-de-gaza-entrainera-une-catastrophe-humanitaire-sans-precedent/

 

https://archive.md/iG3cH

 

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In Jerusalem, the "Conference for the Victory of Israel" threatens London and Washington

by Thierry Meyssan

The "Israel Victory Conference - settlements bring security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria" was no mere meeting of Jewish supremacists. A rabbi, sentenced in xxx to life imprisonment for his crimes, spoke on behalf of the successors of the Stern group that assassinated British leaders in Mandate Palestine. It was a declaration of war against the Anglo-Saxons. By participating in this event, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was threatening Washington and London. President Joe Biden immediately banned all fundraising and money transfers to these extremists. This is the first time that the United States has imposed sanctions against Israelis.

 

Two weeks ago, a star-studded celebratory event was held at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center. It was entitled "Conference for Israel’s Victory - settlements bring security: returning to the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria". 12 ministers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took part.

However, not a single political figure, not even the Minister of Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, was entitled to the frenzied ovations that greeted Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf, now a central figure in the Israeli debate, albeit unknown abroad. His presence rekindled in the participants hope of redeeming what they consider to be the "sin" of the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005.

In the hours that followed, Yaakov Margi (Shas), Minister of Welfare and Social Affairs, declared that his colleagues should have “thought” "before going to this circus.

The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, lamented that Benjamin Netanyahu, "who was once at the centre of the national camp being dragged aimlessly by extremists", has "hit rock bottom."

Gen. Benny Gantz, declared that the conference was "an insult to Israeli society in wartime. It undermines our legitimacy in the world and the efforts to create a framework for the return of our hostages." Commenting on the Prime Minister’s participation, he continued: “He who dances and divides, does not decide, and he who is silent and allows himself to be dragged along, is not a leader".

The next day, President Joe Biden, as if frightened by the return of an old demon, signed
a decree banning some extremist settlers from coming to the United States, and, above all, banning all fund-raising and money transfers to Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf’s men. These sanctions apply not only in the United States, but also in all foreign banks with interests in the United States, i.e., ultimately in the whole of the West [1].

What’s more, the Biden Administration, which until now has discreetly supported the massacre in Gaza by supplying shells and other munitions, is suddenly looking for a way out of the crisis. Secretary of State Antony Blinken set off on a new tour of the region’s capitals, this time with proposals.

Why then, did Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf’s outburst provoke such reactions? To understand why, we need to look back to 1922. Within the revisionist Zionist movement, there is in fact an even more fanatical group that did not hesitate to attack the Anglo-Saxons.

THE "STERN GANG”

The "Revisionist Zionists" are the followers of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Ukrainian fascist who in 1922 formed an alliance with the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" of Symon Petlioura and
Dmitro Dontsov against the Soviets. During this alliance, the "nationalists" massacred not only Ukrainian anarchists and Ukrainian Communists, but also tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews.
Refusing to explain his actions, Jabotinsky resigned from his position as director of the World Zionist Organization and founded the Alliance of Revisionist Zionists. He founded a paramilitary fascist formation in Italy, with the help of duce Benito Mussolini, the Betar.

At the end of Second World War, the "Revisionist Zionists" pursued their fascist dream, now without the help of their Italian counterparts. They disassociated themselves from the Jewish communal militia in Palestine, the Hagana, and created their own militia, the Irgun [2].

In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish personalities compared the Irgun to fascist and Nazi formations [3].

The Irgun itself gave rise to Lehi, known as the "Stern Group” according to the
Stern Gang" [4]). This group was directly linked to the Polish fascist government (Avraham Stern participated in the first version of the "Madagascar Plan"). Stern was arrested by the British along with the leaders of his group at the start of World War 2, but released when the Polish government reconstituted itself in exile in London. Lehi resumed contact with the Italian Fascists and proposed to the Nazis to help them expel European Jews to Palestine. After some hesitation, the Nazis refused. Lehi multiplied attacks on the British and left-wing Jews in the first two years of the war. Avraham Stern was shot and killed by a British CID officer in February 1942. Yitzhak Shamir, who assassinated his rivals, then reorganized Lehi.

In 1944 Lehi resumed its attacks on the British. It narrowly missed eliminating High Commissioner to Palestine, Harold MacMichael, but succeeded in assassinating the Colonial Minister, Lord Moyne.

David Ben Gourion, who remained loyal to the British, launched a Haganah campaign to stop the actions of the Irgun and Lehi. Many of their members were arrested. However, in 1945, Ben-Gurion secretly organized a reconciliation with the revisionist Zionists, the "Hebrew Revolt". This brief alliance did not last. Lehi organized the attack on the secretariat of the British government of Mandate Palestine and its military command, both located in the King David Hotel. It left 91 dead and 46 wounded. Lehi did not cease its terrorist activities with the arrest of Yitzhak Shamir. On the contrary, it extended its activities to London until the British withdrew from Palestine. After that, it targeted the Arabs, thus perpetrating the Deir Yassin massacre.

The Irgun and Lehi were eventually incorporated into the Israel Defense Forces with the
unilateral proclamation of statehood. However, the United Nations sent the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte to determine the borders of the two Jewish and Arab states. Yitzhak Shamir then organized his assassination [5]. Yehoshua Cohen executed him. At the same time, André Sérot, a French colonel in the Blue Helmets, was assassinated. Pierre Gaïsset (grandfather of the author of this article) replaced him. The "revisionist Zionists" then changed their label and formed a new party, Hérout, with Menachem Begin as its chairman.

In 1952, Yehoshua Cohen founded the Sde Boker kibbutz. When, the following year,
Prime Minister David ben Gurion joined this kibbutz, Yehoshua Cohen became his bodyguard.

 

THE JEWISH UNDERGROUND
There is no trace of the Stern Group thereafter. However, after the "Six-Day War” the Bloc of the Faithful (Gush Emunim) developed the idea that Yahweh had given all Palestine to the Jews. They not only had the right to occupy it, but a duty to do so, so that the continuation of prophecy be fulfilled. This movement developed around Rabbi Zvi Yehouda Kook. He taught that, while the first secular Israelis had begun the work, only the religious knew the direction and could
finalize it.

It was in this context that Yehuda Etzion, son of a gang member, recreated the Stern group.
He used the same logo: a fist with two fingers raised. Its new name: the "Jewish Underground". After the Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by ex-Muslim Brother Anwar Sadat and Zionist
revisionist Menachem Begin, it formally organized itself. It opposed Israel’s retrocession of Sinai to Egypt. It formed two cells. The first, led by Yehuda Etzion himself, was to destroy the Dome of the Rock in the center of the Al-Aqsa mosque, in order to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. The second was to spread terror among anti-colonial Arabs.

Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf was the leader of the "Jewish Underground". He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984 for his involvement in a series of murderous attacks on Palestinians. He was discreetly released in 1991 by two revisionist Zionists, President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

His presence and the thunderous welcome given to him by thousands of activists portends the return of Zionist terrorism against the Anglo-Saxons. Washington’s reaction shows that, in its eyes, what it tolerates when Arabs are its victims must be condemned when it is threatened.

Thierry Meyssan

 

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SEE ALSO: https://en.reseauinternational.net/israel-prepare-la-liquidation-de-la-palestine/

 

“This is beyond military occupation, apartheid, economic exploitation, and all the rest,” asserted one journalist. “These are some extremely sickening degenerates.”

 

    BRETT WILKINS

 

Israel Defense Forces officers brought Israeli civilians into detention centers and allowed them to watch and film Palestinian prisoners being tortured, according to survivor testimonies published this week by the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

Prisoners held at detention centers in Zikim on the northern border of the Gaza Strip and at a site in southern Israel affiliated with Naqab Prison “told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers had purposefully presented them before Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian armed factions and that they had taken part in the October 7 attack on Israeli towns,” the group said.

The former detainees said groups of 10-20 Israeli civilians were brought in and allowed to record torture sessions in which the men, stripped nearly naked, were beaten with metal batons, electrocuted, and had hot water poured over their heads. The ex-prisoners said some of the Israelis laughed while filming their torture.

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/02/14/idf-let-jewish-tourists-from-the-us-pay-to-film-torture-killing-of-hostages-children-report/

 

SEE ALSO: https://michaelwest.com.au/doctors-doxed-albanese-to-criminalise-doxing/

 

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By Alan MacLeod
     MintPress News

 

Amid the fast-paced action that saw the Kansas City Chiefs win their third championship in five years, Americans tuning in to watch the Super Bowl were met with a barrage of unusual propaganda.

Nestled between the typical ads for cars and beer were two bizarre messages: one from the Foundation to Combat anti-Semitism (FCAS) and the other from the State of Israel itself. Both were intimately related to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and trying to draw attention away from Israeli war crimes.

The FCAS commercial features Clarence B. Jones, the former advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., who drafted his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The message is that there is a growing tidal wave of racist intolerance in America and that we must all come together to oppose anti-Semitism — the commercial ends by telling people to visit the website StandUpToJewishHate.com.

Super Bowl ads do not come cheap, and its $7 million for 30-second air time price tag was footed by the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots N.F.L. franchise, Robert Kraft. Kraft (net worth: $11 billion) made his fortune in the paper and packaging business and has deep ties to the state of Israel, including donating hundreds of millions of dollars to pro-Israel groups and funding pro-Israel candidates in U.S. elections. He even enjoys a close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Kraft married his wife in Israel in 1962 and has reportedly made over 100 visits to the country, including leading dozens of PR missions there, bringing celebrities and sports stars with him. He also maintains a network of charities across Israel.

In December, he pledged a gigantic $100 million to the FCAS. This was, Forbes reported, to “educate the public about the rise in antisemitic incidents and further develop the relationship between the Black and Jewish communities.” Considering its content and invocation of Dr. King, it seems clear that the Super Bowl ad was part of Kraft’s plan to target the Black community.

Black Americans are far more progressive on Palestine than the rest of the population. Many Black leaders, as well as movements such as Black Lives Matter, have allied themselves with the Palestinian cause, seeing parallels and connections between the oppression of Palestinians abroad and the treatment of Black Americans at home.

A December poll by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that 28 percent of the Black population favored an immediate ceasefire, as opposed to 20 percent of white Americans. Only 5 percent of African Americans wanted the U.S. government to show “unwavering support” to Israel, versus 23 percent of the white population.

 

Funding Anti-Anti-Semitism

In Kraft’s view, therefore, the Black population’s outlook is a problem. The billionaire sports owner founded the FCAS in 2019 amid growing domestic and international opposition to the state of Israel’s apartheid policies in Palestine. He announced the move at a lavish ceremony in Jerusalem, where he was presented with the Genesis Prize – an Israeli government-backed award given to individuals who most aid the Jewish state.

After the ceremony, he had lunch with his friend, Netanyahu. Kraft had previously supported Netanyahu by attending his speech to Congress in 2015. “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft,” Netanyahu said.

Kraft was awarded the $1 million Genesis Prize for his efforts in philanthropy and “combating anti-Semitism.” Yet his views on what does and does not constitute anti-Semitism are contentious, to say the least.

In the wake of the historic wave of protests across the U.S. calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East, he appeared on MSNBC to denounce those taking part as supporters of terrorism. “It’s horrible to me that a group like Hamas can be respected and people in the United States of America can be carrying flags or supporting them,” he said, clearly equating supporting Palestinian rights with terrorism. “Hamas is preaching the eradication of all Jewish people from the Earth,” he added.

Thus, while the FCAS claims to be standing against lies and racism, its founder continues to spread his own disinformation in service of the Israeli project.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also opposes the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement — a grassroots campaign to peacefully bring economic pressure on the state of Israel to stop its oppression and occupation of its neighbors. Kraft sees BDS as a form of anti-Jewish racism, lumping it in with attacks on synagogues or the growing threat from the far-right.

“My vision is to work to end the violence against Jewish communities. To counter the normalization of anti-Semitic narratives that question Israel’s right to exist, disguised as part of legitimate debate on campuses and in the media,” he said, thereby hinting that the FCAS will attempt to insert themselves into college campuses nationwide and pressure the media to take (even) more pro-Israel stances.

 

The Israel Lobby’s Financier

Kraft is one of the Israel lobby’s chief benefactors, donating millions of dollars to various groups throughout his life. In 2022, for example, he gave $1 million to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) super PAC. AIPAC works to push pro-Israel policies across the U.S. and insert pro-Israel language into as many pieces of legislation as possible.

He also funds the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces – a group that raises money to help Israeli soldiers, even as they carry out war crimes in Palestine, Syria and beyond. Other pro-Israel groups, he has given sizeable donations to include:

• American Friends of the Israel Museum
• American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center
• The Anti-Defamation League
• The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
• The Jewish Agency for Israel
• The Jewish National Fund
• StandWithUs
• The Israel Project

Through his organization, Touchdown in Israel, Kraft regularly organizes propaganda trips to Israel for former N.F.L. players, no doubt hoping they will become advocates of the Jewish state.

Arguably the most influential way in which Kraft influences American public life, however, is his consistent funding of right-wing Democrats standing against progressives and advocates for justice in Palestine.

In 2021, for example, he donated $5,800 to Congresswoman Shontel Brown in her contentious face-off against progressive Nina Turner and another $2,900 to her reelection. Brown was a little-known but strongly pro-Israel candidate standing against a democratic socialist, national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign, and an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies.

Vast amounts of pro-Israel money flowed into Brown’s campaign, helping her to defeat Turner. In her acceptance speech, Brown praised Israel and later thanked the Jewish community for “help[ing] me get over the finish line.”

Kraft has also given money to pro-Israel Democrats, including David Cicilline; Juan Vargas; Ted Deutch; Jake Auchincloss and Ritchie Torres.

His actions, donations and public pronouncements have drawn condemnation from some who have followed them. Sports journalist Dave Zirin, for example, recently wrote that:

“He appears to think that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. For Kraft, it is Jews like myself, rabbis, and Holocaust survivors calling for a ceasefire and a free Palestine that are part of the problem. And Kraft seems to think that opposition to Israel, the IDF, and the AIPAC agenda is antisemitism.”

 

Israel on TV

Super Bowl viewers were subjected to another pro-Israel ad in between the action, this one directly funded by and representing the Israeli government.

“To all the dads,” the voiceover says, as images of wholesome fatherhood activities play on the screen, 

“The funny ones, the silly ones, the strong ones, the adventurous ones. To all the dads held in captivity by Hamas for over 120 days, we vow to bring you home.”

On the surface of the ad, the Israeli government was sending a message to Israeli fathers still in Hamas custody. That message was that they were working to bring them home (by spending millions of dollars to air the message on American TV during the Super Bowl.)

The reality, however, is that this was an attempt to sway the American public into identifying with Israel, suggesting that this could happen to any of their fathers’ too.

Many viewers felt that what they saw amounted to little more than expensive disinformation. “I’m sorry, is Israel seriously airing a SOB STORY PROPAGANDA AD during the SUPER BOWL while SIMULTANEOUSLY BOMBING THE REFUGEES AT RAFAH???????” wrote one viewer on Twitter.

Nevertheless, the Super Bowl was the most-watched American telecast ever, reaching over 123 million viewers. Some say you cannot put a price on that sort of publicity, but apparently, you can, and that price is $7 million. Propaganda it might be, but in America, money talks. And both Robert Kraft and the government of Israel certainly have a lot of it to spend.

Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine and Common Dreams.

This article is from MPN.news, an award winning investigative newsroom.  Sign up for their newsletter.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/15/israels-big-game-propaganda/

 

 

 

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Дорогой Владимир,

 

 

 

 

 

By Joe Lauria
in Rochdale, England
Special to Consortium News

Hours afters after British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said it was “beyond alarming” that George Galloway had been elected to Parliament in a by-election at Rochdale, mainstream media reporters descended on the newly elected MP’s headquarters to confront him. 

“I despise the prime minister,” Galloway told them Friday night. “I don’t respect him at all. You keep referring to the prime minister as if that’s supposed to impress me,” Galloway told one reporter. 

Earlier in the day Sunak said in a speech at No. 10: 

“In recent weeks and months, we have seen a shocking increase in extremist disruption and criminality. What started as protests on our streets have descended into intimidation, threats and planned acts of violence. …  Now, our democracy itself is a target. Council meetings and local events have been stormed. MPs do not feel safe in their homes. Longstanding parliamentary conventions have been upended because of safety concerns. …

And it’s beyond alarming that last night, the Rochdale by-election returned a candidate that dismisses the horror of what happened on 7 October, who glorifies Hezbollah and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist former leader of the BNP.

Yes, you can march and protest with passion. You can demand the protection of civilian life. But no, you cannot call for violent jihad. There is no context in which it can be acceptable to beam antisemitic tropes on to Big Ben in the middle of a vote on Israel, Gaza. And there can be no cause that you can use to justify the support of a prescribed terrorist group like Hamas.”

At what was supposed to be a victory celebration, Galloway told a reporter: “The prime minister is a rather diminutive, diminished and degraded politician. He made a party political statement. I don’t care about Rishi Sunak’s attitude.”  He said:

“What I care about is that the returning officer, a man of unimpeachable integrity … declared it a free and fair election, and me as the winner, and Rishi Sunak as one of the crushed, big two parties in the state. That’s all that matters to me.”

Galloway’s supporters, working people and their families, had flooded his headquarters at a Suzuki car dealership to celebrate his victory, in which he outpolled major party candidates by a wide margin. But the food remained in containers as teams of mainstream reporters went after Galloway surrounded by increasingly angry supporters. 

This fed into the prefixed narrative of an “intimidating” largely Muslim crowd of Galloway voters who pose a “threat” to proper, white Britain. 

“There are allegations of intimidation by your supporters,” a reporter persisted. 

“That’s five times that you’ve said that,” Galloway responded. “The returning office last night declared it — you were there — declared it a free and fair election and me the winner. You are just going to have to suck it up. I won the election.”

Another reporter tried to tell Galloway that the result somehow wasn’t legitimate because Labour had no official candidate after it booted Anzar Ali off the ticket because he said Israel was complicit in the Oct. 7 attacks.  

“Are you a Labour press officer?” Galloway sarcastically asked him.

“I’m not sure of the wisdom” of doing another interview, Galloway told a BBC reporter, before accusing her of “gate-crashing” his victory party. “We were welcomed here,” she said. “But you weren’t welcomed to come and invalidate the election.” 

He refuted her statement that Gaza was the main part of his campaign, agreeing only that it was a “strong” part of his message.

“Genocide usually is something that occupies people’s interests, or ought to at least,” he said.  She then incredibly asked if he made promises to Rochdale that he can’t keep.  “I don’t know what I’m doing here. This is my victory party. What do you mean promises I can’t keep? Why don’t you judge whether I kept them at the end of my term?” 

Galloway and the crowd erupted in laughter when she said: “This wasn’t really a huge victory for you when you consider that Labour wasn’t a part of it.”  

“You are shilling for Keir Starmer,” he told her. “Is this the BBC? Am I paying for this?” 

“You may think this wasn’t a normal by-election,” he said, “but I won it and I’m going to Parliament on Monday.”

A Sky News reporter on camera described a “febrile atmosphere” and “you can see the anger in the room.” At times children had to be whisked away as the crowds of reporters and supporters swarming Galloway seemed on the brink of getting out of control.  

“We are tired of dog whistle politics,” a backer shouted.

“You can see the raw emotion,” the reporter said. “I think you’ve got a flavor of the politics right now in Rochdale that this constituency has been witnessing for the past few weeks.”

“We love George!” shouted a supporter. 

“You have no idea what you are talking about,” said another. “You’re just reading everything off paper, aren’t ya?” 

“What do you know about what is happening in Rochdale, to the deprived?” a woman asked him. “George stands up for them. I think you should go back to wherever you came from.”

The crowd then broke out into a chant of “Free, free Palestine.”  The exasperated reporter threw his hands up. 

“Most people thought they were coming to a victory party,” Galloway told the crowd in a speech afterward at the car dealership. “But the television cameras have turned up to question the result of the election.”  

He called Sunak’s speech outside No. 10 “a melodramatic pantomime.” Galloway said:

“He questioned not only our election victory, but more significantly, the right of the British people to peacefully protest against a slaughter in Gaza. … He deliberately tried to conflate protests and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them not Muslims by the way, — he tried to make it a Muslim thing, but it isn’t a Muslim thing, … hundreds of thousands of people … demonstrating their revulsion at the slaughter in Gaza and the support for it from the British government, the British Labour opposition and the vast majority of the British media. Hundreds of thousands have marched, but millions share their revulsion.”

Galloway reiterated that his victory was a threat to the dominance of the two major parties. “No wonder Sunak is alarmed by the election,” he said. “He got whipped not just by me, but by an independent candidate that no one had ever heard of.” 

He said the politicians and the “shills” in the media are “hysterical” about his victory “because they know that if what happened here happens elsewhere also, that big changes can be expected in British politics.” 

Galloway said there are hundreds of constituencies where independent candidates and Worker’s Party candidate can defeat Labour and “thus change the whole arithmetic” of the coming general election this year.  

“No wonder Starmer is worried. No wonder Sunak is alarmed. Because a new political power was born here (Thursday) in Rochdale,” Galloway said. “We are the pioneers.”

With the reporters refusing to leave and the food still packed away, a fed-up Galloway left the room. The media eventually left and he returned to mingle with the crowd when an apparently deranged man entered the room, said his wife had died, spat on the floor, tossed dead flowers to the ground and aggressively approached Galloway to his face, who was led to safety.  

Police arrived and took the man away. 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/02/msm-target-galloway-at-victory-party/

 

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a4t3JKie_k

British MP George Galloway says: ‘I despise the prime minister’

 

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 Biden Orders Investigation of the Brutal Murder/Rape of 6 Year Old Girl by IDF Commandos/US Navy SEALS?????? An investigation by the Washington Post has detailed evidence of Israel’s role in the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza City

The US State Department is set to ask Israel for more details regarding the death of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza, who was killed by Israeli troops accompanies [sic] by embedded US Navy SEALs in the strip in late January. 

“We’re going to go back to the government of Israel and ask them for further information,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said at a briefing on 17 April, calling her the six-year-old’s death “an unspeakable tragedy, something that never should have occurred and never should occur.”

The comments came the same day as a Washington Post report which published findings that Israeli forces were present in the area where the girl had been trapped in a car with her family members, who were already dead. The findings contradict a preliminary Israeli army investigation which stated that troops were not in firing range of the vehicle Rajab was in. 

The girl used a cell phone from the vehicle she was trapped in to contact rescue teams. However, the Palestinian Red Crescent members were killed as they were on their way to save her. 

Paramedics finally reached the Gaza City area 12 days later and found her dead alongside her family members in the vehicle, which had been sprayed with bullets. The Washington Post investigation concluded that Israeli forces were present in the area, and that gunfire could be heard in the audio of her calls to the Red Crescent. 

Citing munitions experts, the outlet added that an ambulance – found around 50 meters from the car Rajab and her family were in – was completely destroyed by Israeli tank fire. The Washington Post investigation is based on satellite imagery, recordings, photos, videos, and interviews with over a dozen people, including dispatchers, rescue workers, and relatives. 

“The ambulance was discovered along a route provided by COGAT, an arm of the Israeli Defense Ministry that generally coordinates safe passage for medical vehicles with the IDF,” the Washington Post wrote, meaning the Israeli army had given safe passage to the team which was on its way to rescue Rajab from the car. 

 

In mid-March, COGAT head of Coordination and Liaison Administration, Elad Goren, told the Washington Post that the agency “coordinated everything … including the ambulance that wanted to go and find Hind,” adding that he was “not aware” of the specifics. 

The Israeli army, however, denied that any coordination had taken place, and did not comment on the findings detailed in the report. 

Washington has concluded that Israel is not systematically targeting civilians in Gaza, despite an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling indicating a plausible genocide being carried out by Israel in the strip. 

Since the war began in October, the US has repeatedly said it would seek answers from Israel regarding specific war crimes or the killing of civilians – but has never launched formal proceedings for any type of investigation.

In late February, dozens of hungry aid seekers in northern Gaza were gunned down by the Israeli military in an incident that has since been dubbed the Flour Massacre. The US said it would look into the incident, but refused to condemn the killings. 

An Israeli army investigation claimed that troops did not open fire at the aid seekers. Aid seekers have been targeted by the Israeli army repeatedly since then. 

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-says-it-will-probe-israeli-killing-of-six-year-old-girl-in-gaza

 

 

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‘FOUND DEAD IN GAZA’? NO, MURDERED BY ISRAEL

After six year-old Hind Rajab was killed by the Israeli army, Britain’s national media failed to unequivocally pinpoint Israel as responsible, refused to follow up the story and cover important new information, and then moved on.

BY DES FREEDMAN

 

When students at Columbia University in New York occupied Hamilton Hall on 29 April as part of their pro-Palestine encampment, they renamed the building ‘Hind’s Hall’. 

This was in memory of six-year-old Hind Rajab who was killed in Gaza exactly three months earlier, along with six other family members, when the Israeli army attacked the car she was travelling in. 

Investigations, including those carried out by Al Jazeera and the Washington Post have established IDF involvement despite their denial.

When their bodies were eventually discovered on 10 February, after the IDF pulled out of Gaza City, along with the corpses of the two Palestinian Red Crescent medics sent to help her, Hind’s murder was headline news around the world.

However, as is the case so often with UK mainstream media coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, many outlets were reluctant to attribute responsibility to Israeli forces and reported Palestinian deaths using the passive voice. 

The BBC scandalously reported the story as “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza” while both the Observer and Sunday Times carried similar headlines, that she had somehow just “died”.

That a young child and her family could have been targeted and killed while trying to escape danger is precisely the kind of “human interest” story that you might have thought mainstream news organisations would focus on to illustrate what they often describe as the “tragedy” of events in Gaza.

Interest evaporated

It’s true that there were hundreds of stories in the UK media that weekend but their interest in these events immediately evaporated. 

Out of the 282 stories across all platforms, many of which were accounted for by the same piece running across different BBC regional bulletins, there were only 24 stories on Hind from the following weekend up until the Columbia students’ actions. 

Most of these references were in readers’ letters, parliamentary transcripts, comment pieces and the London-based Arab press.

The BBC’s promise in a story on 5 February to extract the truth about Hind’s whereabouts from the Israeli army and the Guardian’s attempt to contact the IDF following the announcement of her death appear never to have been followed up. 

The last reference to Hind in the Guardian (until the end of April) was in its “First Dog on the Moon” cartoon strip on 12 February while the BBC’s sole mention after the initial flurry was on 27 February when it rejected a complaint from readers about its coverage. 

The internal adjudication insisted that the BBC was right not to attribute blame given what it knew at the time and stated that it had asked the IDF several times for details on its operations on 29 January.

Remaining silent

The lack of interest by leading UK news outlets in following up the story and holding the IDF to account is all the more disturbing given that other actors were much busier. 

So, for example, the BBC (and other mainstream news media) failed to report on major developments in the case. These included initial findings on 12 February from a leading European human rights organisation that Israel was responsible for the family’s murder.

“Despite their earlier promises, organisations like the Guardian and the BBC remained silent”

Also important were distressing new audio in relation to her death that was widely circulated around the world on 19 February, a comprehensive Al Jazeera investigation of events broadcast on 22 February and even Israel’s denial of involvement that was published on 26 February.

Despite their earlier promises, organisations like the Guardian and the BBC remained silent.

This is all the more shocking when you see that the Washington Post, hardly a bastion of pro-Palestine sentiment, published an extensive and forensic investigation into the events of 29 January in a piece published on 16 April. 

Using satellite images, open-source maps and eyewitness interviews, it found that despite repeated IDF denials, the army had indeed been in the area that day.

Did the Guardian and the BBC, or any other UK news organisations, rush to report this and to revise their refusal to attribute blame in the light of new evidence? They did not.

Investigation

Instead it was left to the Jerusalem Post to call on the Israeli army to carry out a full investigation, albeit of course simply as a way of “maintaining legitimacy and allied support” for its genocidal actions. 

Reuters, meanwhile, reported that, following the Washington Post story, the State Department was planning to add its weight for a full investigation (though not surprisingly, nothing has been forthcoming).

This was the state of play until the Columbia students took their solidarity action and renamed their occupied building in memory of Hind. This led to a further flurry of references to the events of 29 January but, for the most part – and despite the updated evidence – few lessons had been learnt.

The BBC’s US coverage on 30 April of the Columbia occupation referred to Hind as a “six-year-old found dead in Gaza earlier this year”. 

The Guardian described her as having been “killed by gunfire in January” and, in a separate story, as having been “found dead inside a car surrounded by her relatives”. 

Dehumanisation

Israeli responsibility, where it was mentioned, was always alleged, as in the claim by The Times (1 May) that Hind was a “six-year-old girl whose family say she was killed by the Israeli army”.

There were some limited exceptions. On 1 May, the Independent stated that Hind was “killed by Israeli military” while the Guardian, for the very first time,acknowledged that she was “killed by Israeli forces earlier this year” (although this was one isolated phrase in a much longer story about the campus protests).

The tone of the coverage and the lack of interest in pursuing the perpetrators is hardly exclusive to the murder of Hind Rajab. It’s resonant of the wider dehumanisation and misrepresentation of Palestinian lives that we have seen in mainstream reporting of the assault on Gaza.

But the silences are revealing of a further problem – of a kind of historical amnesia in which “uncomfortable” elements of the past are airbrushed out. 

Things like occupation and ethnic cleansing are largely absent from a journalism which has a different chronology and a specific politics: one in which the “war” started on 7 October and in which the demand for Palestinian sovereignty is marginalised or simply forgotten.

However, while individuals suffer from amnesia as a result of trauma, the media’s forgetting is self-induced: a deliberate act designed to insulate them from having to report or to follow up stories – for example on military linkswith Israel, genocide or the murder of innocent six-year-old girls – that might upset governments in London, Washington and Jerusalem. 

And when mainstream news outlets do even partially acknowledge an outrage, the reaction, as evidenced by the coverage of the murder of Hind Rajab, appears to be one of “move on – nothing to see here”.

We cannot afford to move on nor to look away and a journalism that does this is part of the problem.

 

https://www.declassifieduk.org/found-dead-in-gaza-no-murdered-by-israel/

 

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